Portrait of Praneet Suresh is unavailable

Praneet Suresh

PhD - McGill University
Supervisor
Danilo Bzdok
Research Topics
Computer Vision
Deep Learning
Generative Models
Mechanistic Interpretability
Representation Learning

Publications

Steering CLIP's vision transformer with sparse autoencoders
Sonia Joseph
Praneet Suresh
Ethan Goldfarb
Lorenz Hufe
Yossi Gandelsman
Robert Graham
Danilo Bzdok
Wojciech Samek
Blake Richards
While vision models are highly capable, their internal mechanisms remain poorly understood-- a challenge which sparse autoencoders (SAEs) ha… (see more)ve helped address in language, but which remains underexplored in vision. We address this gap by training SAEs on CLIP's vision transformer and uncover key differences between vision and language processing, including distinct sparsity patterns for SAEs trained across layers and token types. We then provide the first systematic analysis of the steerability of CLIP's vision transformer by introducing metrics to quantify how precisely SAE features can be steered to affect the model's output. We find that 10-15% of neurons and features are steerable, with SAEs providing thousands more steerable features than the base model. Through targeted suppression of SAE features, we then demonstrate improved performance on three vision disentanglement tasks (CelebA, Waterbirds, and typographic attacks), finding optimal disentanglement in middle model layers, and achieving state-of-the-art performance on defense against typographic attacks. We release our CLIP SAE models and code to support future research in vision transformer interpretability.
2025-03-30
thecvf.com/CVPR/2025/Workshop/MIV (poster)
openreview.net
openreview.net